


Poor Unfortunate Souls

by exoscopy



Category: Problem Sleuth (Webcomic)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Mobsterswitch, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-18
Updated: 2015-05-18
Packaged: 2018-03-31 03:31:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3962815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exoscopy/pseuds/exoscopy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Poor, unfortunate souls. In pain, in need.</i>
</p>
<p>Peccant Scofflaw built an empire. You can't build empires without making a few hard choices, but there's no reason those choices had to be hard for <i>him</i>. The trick to successful management is good delegation.</p>
<p>
  <i>Yes, I've had the odd complaint. But on the whole, I've been a saint! To these poor, unfortunate souls.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

You settle in to the cream-coloured ‘burbs of Metropolis Central after exile. It’s a glittering desert haven, where Dersites and Prospitians live side by peaceful side; where any carapace who’s willing to work hard and be a useful member of the Metropolis can eke out a comfortable living for themselves. So they say.  
  
  
You are the Watchful Cannoneer. You have been fighting the war for so long that you are always craning to hear the familiar, terrible sound of a Dersite warship opening its deployment hatches. One time you hear the screech of artillery and you run outside in panic, looking around for the bomb; it’s only when you see the kid with the portable radio that you realize how much of you the war replaced.  
  
  
In a city full of exiles there are places for people like you. The Dersite Veteran’s Association. The Support Group for Retired Artillerymen. Her Royal Majesty’s Retired Airman’s League. You meet the Conscientious Videographer at one of them; he is doling out coffee and biscuits from behind a rickety folding table. You nearly trip on the table leg, sending the whole rig crashing down, and he waves off your frantic apologies and laughs it off with, “We needed a new table anyway.”  
  
  
It takes you eight months to gather up the courage to ask if he would be amenable to a meal, maybe even coffee that isn’t served in a pink-and-green paper cup. It takes him half a second to say yes.  
  
  
It seems like he is the oil your propulsion assembly had been lacking, all this time. Two weeks after your awkward, clumsy dinner date - where you tried a lot of ways of saying that you liked seeing him, lots, and that you would be really quite amenable to continuing to see him, lots - you get a job as a editor at your council office. Four perigees later, CV moves in, where you can find even more ways of saying that you like him a lot and you want to see him all the time, at all hours of the day, even some hours of the night (if he is amenable to that).  
  
  
You leave scraps of paper around the office by accident, bits and pieces you scribble down in between madly transcribing and arranging council newsletters. It’s a habit you kept from your artillery days - just thoughts, nothing too special, something to keep your mind from crashing while you listen to the rattle of the artillery housing and waited for the captain to give the signal. It’s nothing, at least until your boss fires Magnanimous Speechwriter.  
  
  
MS is leaving in tears, her latest work in red-splashed tatters clutched to her chest. You comfort her near the water cooler and ask, very gently if you can take a look - she practically shoves it at you in her haste to get it out of her hands. Career poison. Or not, you think critically, squinting at it - it could do with some polishing, but it’s not so bad.   
“He’s an idiot,” you tell her, and she looks at you with huge eyes like you’ve just been prototyped.   
  
  
The two of you work together all through the night on that speech, with CV cheering you on and providing biscuits. You drop it on the boss’s desk at the crack of dawn the next morning, your fingers still shaking from the coffee and the frantic typing, and he frowns at it and looks at you and demands if you wrote this - you nod, point at MS, take care to mention that it’s a group effort -   
  
  
And suddenly, just like that, you’re climbing the ranks. People seem to like you, seem to like the way you give credit where credit’s due and your professional, military bearing. CV’s the one that puts the idea in your head, after four sweeps of seeing the inside of a campaign office: why not try it out for yourself?  
“I think you’d make a great councillor,” he says fondly, smiling at you through the steam from his hot chocolate. “Wonderful Campaigner. Doesn’t it sound nice?” You tell him, in between laughter, that you’d take the city by storm if he ran your ad campaign.  
  
  
You make City Council four sweeps later, on your cloning day. You and CV pose for a gaggle of cameras in front of your cream-painted house on your cream-painted street and you tell them how great you’re going to make this city; how much you love this city already.   
  
You marry CV that year, and promise him that no matter how much you love the city, you’ll love him even more.  
  
  
But climbing a ladder isn’t the same as walking the tightrope, and you are showing the strain of it four perigees later. The power plant you had hopes to build is blocked by lobbyists, losing you one electorate; your attempts at compromise come across as being ‘soft’, the newspaper tells you, and your civil service cluck their tongues at your efforts to salvage the situation. Your attitude to crime is too soft, always too soft, and the media savages you viciously for a month over your decision to stand down the latest police chief on his failure to capture Notorious Trafficker (or, indeed, any notorious felons at all).   
  
It takes you any number of media conferences, and any number of scars on your reputation, but you think you have finally learned their game.   
1\. Don’t give an inch;  
2\. Feign ignorance - ignorance is better than compromise;   
3\. Reputation is better than action;   
4\. Nothing is a disaster as long as it results in good PR.   
  
CV stands by you through all this, fielding calls, evicting journalists from your property. He brings you lunch at your office every week but you don’t notice when it becomes every perigee, and then every so often, and you only realise you haven’t had a home-cooked lunch in a sweep when it becomes _never_. Some nights you go home and he’s already asleep, curled up in front of the TV; always on the news channel for some reason.   
  
Some nights you don’t come home at all.  
  
You see him less and less often; he’s busy with the veterans work again, helping people get settled in just like he helped you. You miss him. You tell him that one night, one of those rare nights you get home early, and he looks at you with real irritation and it feels like a punch in the gut.   
  
It’s election season for the second time when he tells you that he’s leaving.  
  
“Why?” you say, dry-mouthed, and he looks at you like you turned into a horrorterror.   
“You can’t,” you plead, and then you order and threaten, you tell him how this will turn into a media fiasco with your ratings already borderline, you tell him how he’ll be damaged goods. He looks at you through all this with genuine horror and you can’t stand seeing it on his face, not when it’s directed at you.  
  
One perigee, you say. Just one more perigee and you’ll try and turn things around. After three hours of arguing he finally gives you assent, weary and tight-lipped, and you lie sleepless in bed next to him -- not touching -- for the rest of the night.   
  
  
One perigee later, and you’ve nearly run yourself into the ground trying to make him stay. It’s two perigees to the election and the media is already whispering poisonously about how your marriage is on the rocks, how a politician who can’t keep his own relationships together shouldn’t be trusted to run a city. You’re at a nice restaurant on Little Cubes St where you ask him -- half hopeful and half wary -- if he’s staying, and he sighs and says no.  
  
  
You don’t argue. You change the subject, and it’s only once you leave the restaurant that you drag him into a side alleyway and scream at him behind a dumpster.  
You can’t do this to me, you say, you say it over and over again, and it’s only once you are crying _do you know what the media will say_ that you realise he’s blacked out.  
  
  
There’s blood on your hands, and blood on the wall from where you pushed him and shook him and -- and _slammed_ him, there’s so much _blood_ , and you cry out in shock.   
  
  
For the first time in sweeps, you think you can hear bombs falling.  
  
  
“That’s one hell of a mess,” says a voice from the shadows, sort of _admiringly_ , and you almost leap out of your suit.  
  
“Who’s there?” You stumble to your feet. There’s too much darkness; you can’t see them. You scrub at your watery eyes frantically and blunder forward, flailing around, trying to grab them; they can’t talk, they mustn’t.   
  
“Aw, no one, boss,” says the voice, poisonously friendly. “Just a witness! Murder would sure be rough on your career, wouldn’t it?”  
  
“Who are you?” you say, dry-mouthed. “I didn’t kill him. Whatever you saw, it was a mistake-”  
  
“A mistake that ended up with this guy’s blood all over your nice suit! Sure is a nice suit,” and the voice is now _behind you_ , and you whirl around. Your shoes are expensive, but they’ve got poor grip; you slide on something wet and land butt-first in a pile of plastic bags and refuse.   
  
Perched over poor CV’s crumpled body is a Dersite in a long black trenchcoat and a fedora, and you think dimly, _I’ve seen you_. His face turned up in a newspaper once, a front-pager about some fellow who swept into a bank and got the tellers to hand over all the cash without a single gun in sight. Never seen again. You wonder his next front-pager is going to be about a politician found murdered in an alleyway.  
  
“Don’t worry, I’m not about to kill you,” he says brightly, springing to his feet. His grin somehow makes the air feel colder, thin and clammy underneath your suit. There is sweat on your collar. Grey dirt clouds your vision; screaming fills your ears. “I wouldn’t go about wiping out upstanding politicians! Lowlife politicians, though,” he whistles. “Them’s a different matter. But you’re not one of those fellas, are you?” In three quick strides he’s crossed the alley and planted a foot on your chest, and you can’t breathe.   
  
“What are you going to do?” you croak breathlessly.   
  
“First of all-” He leans over and sticks out a hand. You stare blankly at it, and he huffs an annoyed sigh. “ _Shake_ , boss.” Numbly, you do. He brightens. “I’m Peccant Scofflaw. I think we’re both in a unique position where we can do a favour to one another!”   
  
“You’re blackmailing me,” you say thinly. You can’t think over the rush of cold churning through your ears.   
  
“Yes!” he practically bounces on his heels, and you wish he wouldn’t, not when he has a heel on your sternum. “Glad you get the gist of it. Now, it seems to me we have a dead body on our hands, and unlike you, boss, I find myself knowing a bit about how to get rid of dead bodies.”  
  
“He’s not dead!” It bubbles out of you from somewhere crusty and rusted, somewhere that remembers cuddling on the couch and homemade hot chocolate and a warm smile from the opposite of a refreshments bench.  
  
  
The gunshot is unexpectedly loud, and you nearly crack your head against the wall trying to scramble away. Peccant Scofflaw presses you down and you gasp, seeing stars, as all the air is ground out of your lungs under one sharp black sole.   
  
“Is now,” Scofflaw says casually, waving the smoke away from the barrel of the gun, and you can’t help but let out a muffled sound of terror.  
  
“You shot him,” you gasp, half in tears. He just grins.  
  
“What’s the saying, boss? Dead men don’t talk? And you don’t want him blabbing about how the new mayor beat him half to death in an alleyway, do you?” He twirls the gun. “Now, say if the new mayor - sorry, mayor _to be_ -” and you hate yourself for the way you inhale at that notion, “had his husband of many sweeps shot to death in front of him in an alleyway - muggers, you know how careless they get - now, then, a lot of people might be feeling sorry for the mayor. To be.” His face suddenly fills the whole of your visual field, and you wheeze; his heel is cutting a crescent-shaped mark in your stomach. “Especially not if the mayor says it was the Frog Street Bruisers. Nasty lot, those ones.” Peccant Scofflaw shakes his head. “So sorry for your loss.”  
  
“Are you with the Frog Street Bruisers?” You’re trying to memorise his face, so they can match it to a name and a file, so you can tell them who shot CV. He snorts.  
  
“Would I be telling you to sing that song if I was? Give me some credit! I’m not the most imaginative guy,” he says, looking hurt, “but I’ve got feelings, you know!”   
  
“What do you get? - from this?” You try to struggle out from under his heel and this time he lets you. The gun never leaves his hand, though. You keep hoping that someone, anyone, will walk by and find him pointing a gun at you - but if they do they might find CV, and who knows what Scofflaw will say?  
  
You sag gently against the wall. His smile is the most terrifying thing you have ever seen; you imagine it’s the sort of smile a horrorterror smiles before it engulfs a soul.   
  
“Well, the Bruisers are a clumsy bunch,” he says, shrugging. “Nobody’s going to question it if they were stupid enough to knock over a politician’s partner.” He just grins. “But even if you don’t, there’s always _this_!” And he flourishes a camera at you, just out of your reach.   
  
There’s no choice, after that. He takes your wallet and gives you a black eye and a nasty bruise on your temple. “Just to make things believable. You don’t want them thinking you’re a _liar_ , do you, boss?” he says, brightly, but there’s a flash of genuine glee in his expression when he hefts the handgun. He also kindly lends you his phone to call the ambulance and make a police report. The paramedics arrive to find you cradling CV’s body, not quite crying; you are too burnt-out, too shaken to cry.   
  
  
Now when you close your eyes you see black and white, but not in checkerboard: it’s a Dersite face looming close, horrible crescent grin burned into the inside of your retinas. You can wake up gasping, but there’s no one else there to hear you; a tin of hot chocolate sits unopened in your cupboard for perigees, and each time you look at it you think of a pink-and-green paper cup being handed over to you by a carapace with a lovely smile.  
  
The Frog Street Bruisers are caught and trialed. You spend your testimony in a haze, but  every time you open your mouth the courtroom vanishes and you’re in that dark alley again and Scofflaw is quizzing you on the sequence of events _who what where who had the gun describe his face no, he’s uglier, gee boss, your memory sure is poor._ Four of them get a sentence for assault and robbery, one gets a sentence for murder.   
  
You become mayor. The vote for you’s not overwhelming, but it’s a comfortable margin. The papers are devoid of their usual venom; you cut out all the articles that talk about CV, all the tributes and interviews, and you pin them to your fridge and sit on the floor opposite them and stare and wait and wait. People call you, mostly CV’s friends, and offer to talk and send their condolences and one day it becomes too much and you take all the sympathy cards and letters and articles and dump them in a pile and set fire to it in your back yard.  
  
“Nothing like a fire to keep you warm when you’re alone, huh?”   
  
You turn in slow motion. Peccant Scofflaw is sitting on your roof, legs dangling off the edge. He’s nothing more than a faint silhouette against the midnight sky, but there’s no imitating that inimitable grin.   
  
“What are you doing here?” you say, more calmly than you feel.  
  
“Just come along to see how you were coping with your loss. Always a hard time,” he says, propping his chin on one hand. “I’m here for you if you need to talk! I’m a good listener. Always got an ear to spare,” and he tosses something down in front of you.  
  
It’s an ear.   
  
You don’t throw up. You can’t be sick at violence any more, not after that night where Scofflaw shot CV.   
  
“Also wanted to say thanks,” he says cheerfully.   
  
“What for?” You kick the ear into the fire and you’re surprised at how calm you are. Then again, the worst he can do now is shoot you. He won’t shoot you yet.  
  
“Frog Street’s a nice place,” he says casually. “Plenty of nice businesses. Good boost to your economy. Smart owners who’re willing to pay a modest amount to keep their business going smoothly -- interruptions would be bad for business, right?” He waits for some response from you, but you don’t give one. Eventually, he shrugs.  
  
“Anyway,” he says casually, “there is something you could do for me.”   
  
He flicks a photograph down, down; you snatch it out of the air and tuck it into a pocket without looking. You know what it’ll be: CV dazed against the wall and blood on your fists.   
  
“Then let’s talk business, Mr. Scofflaw,” you say, your tone neat and clipped. “Care to come inside?”  



	2. Chapter 2

You can taste silica all the way down your throat. Basalt for flavour. Pumice for texture. Your cheeks are bitten red and raw from the wind and the dust and your eyes feel like you’ve dipped them in vinegar. You wouldn’t do that, you think. Not again. The first time was for science, but a second time would just be masochism. That would be pointless.  
   
You are Peculiar Innovator, and you are thoroughly sick of being homeless.  
   
Metropolis Central is the gem of the desert, a haven, a refuge - yes, yes, you’ve heard the propaganda, but when the windy season comes along (Metropolis Central seasons exist in a two-by-two rubric;  _scorching_ and  _freezing_  on one side,  _tempestuous_ and  _stifling_ on the other) they could be sued for false advertising. Metropolis Central in the windy season is most accurately described as ‘hell on earth’. You huddle down into your tattered collar and wade into the wind, trying not to get blown over.  
   
It’s been half a sweep, at most, since your craft touched down and you were unceremoniously kicked into the desert to fend for yourself — a task you found difficult enough in the orderly confines of the Dersite bureaucracy. Back on Derse you lived in government dormitories close to the cloning labs — you needed to be nearby if something went wrong — where all your bills were paid, food was served on a regular basis, and you never had to worry about accommodation because as long as you did your job they would take care of you.   
   
It would have been easier if you had been a diplomat or a soldier. There are funds and societies set up for those; the Mayor has a five-digit-a month charity named after his deceased husband. You could have slipped in with one or the other but to be honest, it unnerves you to be around people who aren’t floating in several gallons of biogenic fluid.   
   
You have tried. You have really, really tried. But with so few of your kind, they had to get the programming right; everything was focused on the scientific processes of rewiring neural pathways and rigging machines to clone life from tons of carbon and nitrogen and oxygen. Nowhere in your lines and lines of code is there anything to do with  _what to do when faced with helplessness_ , or  _how to talk to people who aren’t programmed like you_ , or  _how to be anything but Peculiar Innovator_. Your code is flexible, of course — Innovators write codes for the long haul — but its yield point is certainly low.

  
   
Your destination is the market hall on the corner of Glass and Dew Streets, where if you are lucky the stall owners sometimes take pity on you. More importantly it is out of the wind, which is currently tearing your skin raw. The windstorms around Metropolis Central are capable of stripping a half-ton carcass to bone within two hours, they say, and you aren’t even a tenth of a ton soaking wet.  
   
You slip inside unnoticed, through the goods entrance, and finally flip your collar down with trembling hands. Your skin feels sore to the touch. The coat is standard-issue refugee gear and made for a carapace with a significantly broader build; nothing for your height and weight. Good for eliciting sympathy, you have noticed. Ill-fitting clothing seems to invoke some sort of primitive instinct that encourages them to give you food. When accompanied with your haggard expression, it is a relatively potent combination.  
   
But after twenty minutes your usual approach isn’t working. The shopkeepers just give you a glance before moving on to  _paying_ customers, and you’re getting more and more frantic as you skulk between sections; why is it still so busy? It should be nearly closing time. There is a notable precedent that this is the optimal time to approach shopkeepers for charity.   
   
It takes you twenty more minutes to get your answer and you find it taped to a wooden post in the middle of the market hall.  _Open until 5pm today for Founding Day_.  
   
Assessment: leaving the market hall at 5pm will give you only half an hour to reach the soup kitchen on the corner of Treasure and Quartz, which is on the other side of town. If you miss that 5:30 session it will mean that whatever you can glean from here is all you will have eaten since two days past (you were unable to get here yesterday, the dust storms would have blown you off your feet; all you could do was huddle in the shadow of Blue St Station with the other homeless and wait for the howling to stop). There is no guarantee that you will be able to obtain enough food from here for a real meal. In the past you have been known to get lucky; there is a slim probability that some kind person will give you more than enough to eat, but precedence suggests that this is unlikely. A one in thousand and thirty-two chance by your calculations.   
   
The other option doesn’t even occur to you until you see the small carapace dart out from under a tarp, snatch a peach, and vanish back under it.   
   
You stand there transfixed for some time, waiting to see if they are caught. Nobody seems to have noticed. How could they? It was almost so fast that no one would see it if they hadn’t been paying attention, and you are finding, more and more, that nobody pays attention to things beyond their dull little lives. No one pays attention to the carapace shivering on Little Cubes Street. (Winters in the desert are harsher than on Derse; that was your first, and you are dreading the next one. If not for your too-large coat you would have frozen to death outside all those nice restaurants. As it was, it was a close thing.)  
   
All the carapaces are preoccupied with their own shopping for their own little celebrations; no one is looking at you. It makes your gut, already aching from hunger, twist a little more. Of course no one is looking at you. For once this is something you want.  
 

  
You slip an apple under your coat, and for a heart-stopping moment you think no one has noticed.   
“Hey,” the carapace behind the stall says, and every nerve in your brain starts into shock —  _someone removed the surge protectors_ , you think wildly, and then someone touches your shoulder and your legs move when your brain won’t.   
   
You are a terrible runner. You were programmed for intellect, not turns of speed; your legs are all cogs and wrenches rather than the pneumatic spring assembly you need right now. You nearly stumble headfirst into another stall and right yourself, clutching on a post, only to have someone grab at your coat — this would never have happened on Derse, you think, only to remember that you never left your lab on Derse and food was provided and you were safe, you were  _safe_ , you were  _safe_ and needed and  _safe_.   
   
It’s a jarring shock when you actually run. You can feel the concrete through your paper-thin soles. Your heart feels like it’s going to pound through your ribs and you know that this is a biological impossibility and you also know that you used to perform biological impossibilities on a daily basis;  _why not this one_? Someone behind you is shouting and your breaths feel like they are tearing up your throat, finishing the job the wind started. You will be caught, you know this, and taken to — what will happen? You don’t actually know, and that terrifies you more than anything else because you were not programmed to deal with uncertainty.   
   
Voices getting louder, legs starting to burn already. You shove your way through crowds who are turning to look. It was a stupid move to run but what else could you do? It’s not easy to slip through with your height and - your height makes you a target, this is bad, bad bad bad, bad, and you squeeze your eyes shut and you do the only thing you can think of.  
   
Purple shadows boil up to meet you, and you vanish.  
   
You land on your hands and knees with your face mashed against cold concrete; there’s a dull throb in your nose from where something may be broken, but that’s nothing compared to the stabbing pain behind your temples. The Shady Thing is a last resort and you are only now remembering why, because your head feels like an entire switchboard of short-circuits and your vision has become explosively unreliable all of a sudden. Blindly, you claw your way to the nearest wall, where you curl into a miserable ball and clutch your bleeding nose.   
   
If your fellow homeless seem surprised that you’ve appeared into their midst out of nowhere, they don’t show it. What few of them there are left at this time of day are probably unconscious or dying. You stare helplessly into the darkness and this is all wrong: you should be surrounded by new lives, not fading ones; they should be behind thick glass, not wrapped in fraying blankets. You miss the cloning labs. You miss your experiments. You miss not worrying where your next meal was going to come from or about freezing to death in the middle of the night.  
   
Slowly, you fumble the apple out from your coat and nibble at it. It’s sour, but crisp, and you tentatively lick the juice from your chin. You cannot waste a drop. It takes all your self-control not to devour the whole thing at once; you eke it out bite by bite, over what feels like an eternity, and wonder if you can make it to the soup kitchen without being seen.  
   
“How did you do that?”  
   
You are fairly sure you would have screamed if you had the energy, and you press yourself back against the wall as hard as you can. The apple flies out of your hand in your mad flailing and — you don’t hear it drop.  
   
“Handy skill to have!” He walks out of the shadow of a pillar, your half-eaten apple in one hand, and you watch dumbfounded as he settles on the ground cross-legged opposite you. “I mean, for a felon, that is.”  
   
He is smiling. At you. You are not entirely familiar with the phenomenon any more. The women at the soup kitchen smile at you, but it’s the same smile they give everyone else in line. It makes you feel like another faceless vagrant. But he smiles as though he knows you,  _familiar_ , and despite how comforting it is it shakes you a little: the only things you have ever been familiar with are the access codes for the cloning programs.   
   
“Peccant Scofflaw! Good to meet you.” He offers your apple back to you. “So what’s your name?”   
   
You are not sure what is happening. You try to say something, a few times, but each time you seem unable to make a sound. After a few minutes of this he laughs and says, “Quiet fella, aren’t you?” He hefts your apple. “Mind if I have a bite?”  
   
You nod soundlessly, even though your stomach is rumbling in protest. Quick as a switch, he produces a knife. You had not expected this. You shrink a little; weapons are never a good sign.   
   
“Oh, this?” He waves the knife with an ease that suggests he knows how to use it. Bad. Worse. “Don’t worry about that, it’s only for when things get serious. I’m not really a serious guy!” He smiles again, this time with all his teeth, and slices off a neat wedge of apple.

 

“Here,” he says, and hands it over to you speared on the knife, and you stare at him through starbursts in your vision and you’re not sure whether to cry or — cry.  
   
Eventually, you scrape up enough courage to fumble the piece of apple off the edge of his blade. It takes all your concentration not to cut your trembling fingers; you slump back against the wall and eat it in one mouthful. It tastes like nothing and you’re not sure whether it’s fear or oxidation that’s leached all the flavour from it.  
 

  
You sit there in silence and he hands you piece after piece of apple, which you are too afraid to stop taking, and it only dawns on you after some time that there was not nearly this much apple left. You force your eyes away from the ground to look at him and he is sitting there, still smiling at you, another perfect pink apple in the cup of his hand.  
   
“Feeling better?” he says mildly, and you jerk a hasty nod.  
   
“Good! Great,” he says, halving the next apple in one neat stroke. “So, your name?”  
   
“Innovator,” you whisper. “Peculiar Innovator.”  
   
“Innovator, huh? Mind if I call you Inny?” He grins, shrugs at what you suppose must be your indignant expression. “Innovator’s such a mouthful, Inny! I’m a busy man!”  
   
“Whatever is easiest for you,” you submit grudgingly, or at least as grudgingly as you are able. “May - may I know why you are - helping me?” It’s hard to find the precise words for this bizarre mess.  
   
“The disappearing act!” He chuckles. “It’s one hell of a neat trick! I could stand knowing how to do that,” he winks at you, “or at least I could stand knowing a guy who does. Say, are you cold?”  
   
“A - yes - yes, somewhat, but - but it’s no trouble,” you stammer. Scofflaw is too close and he pays too much attention and despite yourself you are allowing him to. You cannot quite stop yourself from being honest.   
   
He is suddenly leaning over you, a shapeless shadow blocking the poor light, and your breath squeaks out of your lungs in one horrible sound. The next thing you know you are covered in something warm, heavy and — not soft, precisely, but more comfortable than anything you are presently wearing. Scofflaw sits back down, this time next to you, and he is missing his coat.  
   
“Oh,” you say, because there is nothing else to say. “Thank you very much, I — are you cold?”   
   
“Not as much as you are, I’m guessing,” and this time he slings an arm around your shoulders and you go stiff, everything suddenly bright and awful. You are not used to human contact, and you are not used at all to how  _strange_  it feels.   
   
“Here,” he says, and offers you a bottle. “Are you thirsty?”  
   
You want so badly to say no, but your manners and the headache will not let you.   
   
“A little bit,” you manage. “Thank you.” You cautiously sniff at the bottle. It doesn’t smell like anything, at first, and then the fumes hit you and you are fairly sure they cauterize your nostrils. You double over, coughing, clutching Scofflaw’s coat to your mouth, and he is holding the bottle so you do not tip it over and his hand is around yours.   
   
You can feel your headache growing worse. He smells of something thick and cloyingly expensive, and tobacco, and he is practically draped across you. His warmth is a very odd counterpoint to the cold concrete scraping against your lower back and you feel trapped but — but not in a bad way. You think despairingly about how every single thing you used to know is useless here, including language.   
   
“Um.” You clear your throat, and straighten. His fingers flex before letting go. Interpreting the gesture is beyond you at this point; the bottle is very inviting and you do not decline invitations.  
   
You swear you can smell it going down — not that you swear, of course, you are not a swearing man — and it makes your throat constrict; you splutter, you choke, and then you drink again. You do not know what has possessed you. What you do know is that Scofflaw is sitting next to you, smiling peacefully, and he is the first person in Metropolis Central who has asked you your name. Sooner or later he will get bored and leave, and when he does you want to be detached enough that it won’t hurt.   
   
Perhaps it will even solve the headache problem.  
   
“Whoa, there,” he says, laughing, and you blink. Your vision is still fuzzy, but in a markedly different way. The bottle is a lot lighter than it was when you started. He tugs it out of your grasp and you fumble for it until he pushes you away, not unkindly.   
   
“Easy there,” he says, grinning. “Let’s get some food in you before you try that, huh?”   
   
“You,” you say heavily, but you have forgotten where that was going and you lean gingerly against the wall, cuddling his coat. “You,” you start again, and this time your motor coordination fails you and your head drops sideways, onto his shoulder. You try and struggle up, mumbling barely-coherent apologies, but he pushes your head back down and coos in your ear, “S’alright, Inny. Innovator. Whatever. I’ll take care of that. And everything else, too. Don’t worry your brainy little head about a thing.”  
   
The words warm you the same way the drink did, a prickling burn that may indicate that the topmost layer of your digestive tract is peeling off. It’s only after a few moments that you recognize the feeling with a sudden panic: heaviness, dry mouth, sudden difficulty breathing — this is not just alcohol, surely.   
   
“Jeez, you’re a lightweight,” is the last thing you hear, close to your ear and scratchy and soft. “Nothing wrong with that, Inny, just makes you a cheap date.”


	3. Chapter 3

“The hell’s this, Scofflaw?” The voice is like thunder in a bucket. The first thing you feel upon waking is someone’s hand, crushingly heavy on your thin chest, and you try to squirm out from under it but you physically _can’t_.  
  
“Help,” you gasp. You are barely loud enough to hear yourself. The block of cement on your ribcage definitely doesn't take notice.  
  
“You’re going to crush him, AD,” Scofflaw says from somewhere unnervingly close. Someone grunts; the weight on your chest lifts. Your eyelids try to force their way open but they feel like they're full of lead; you catch a glimpse of patchy white paint before your itching eyes sink shut again.  
  
“Oh! He’s awake. Are you awake?” Peccant Scofflaw sings into your ear. “How are you feeling, Inny? Do you want to have a bit more lying-down time?”  
  
“No, thank you,” you murmur, struggling to sit up. The drug hasn’t completely worn off. Your mouth is still far too dry, your stomach still hurts; most of all your headache hasn’t worn off, and you wince at what feels like an entire Dersite mining unit pounding at the inside of your skull. Your vision has cleared enough that you can make out the horrible mint-green paint on the walls, the concrete floor. There are no windows. The only light is from a bare bulb on the ceiling. You like it; it reminds you of the cloning labs.  
  
“PI here’s got some skills which I think could be good for the business,” Scofflaw says lightly, his arm around you again. “Peculiar Innovator, meet Angry Delinquent!”  
  
“Doesn’t look like much,” Angry Delinquent says. You squint at him.  
  
Delinquent is a mammoth of a man in a pygmy elephant package. Even sitting down you’re almost his height, but he’s as broad as four of you. He looks at you with utter disdain; you cannot entirely blame him. You don’t feel like much.  
  
“Looks are deceiving. For example, AD, you look like a smart guy,” Scofflaw says, and rushes on before Delinquent can respond. “Inny here was the one who vanished in the middle of the Dew Street market hall! Did you hear about that, AD? Guess not,” Scofflaw says after a fractional pause. “Anyway, what do you think when you hear something like that? I think it sounds like the kind of guy whose talents we could use -- right, Inny?”  
  
“You kidnapped me,” is the first thing you can say, mind darting down pathways rusted by the drug. You are dully surprised that this did not occur to you earlier. “Am I -- isn’t that illegal?”  
  
The two of them roar with laughter. You have to clap your hands to your ears to keep from falling over at the sudden burst of noise; it translates into knifelike pain behind your eyeballs and a rattling in your skull you’re convinced is not quite psychosomatic.  
  
“Oh, you’re a cute one.” Scofflaw wipes mock tears from his eyes. You blink at the pitted floor, unsure whether to be offended.  
  
“That’s the point, runt,” Delinquent agrees. “He going to be the brains of the outfit, Scoff? Cos if that’s what you’ve got in mind we’d be better off with you as the smart one instead.” Somewhere in your head, a while loop meets the conditions for its execution. _State rank and function, Innovator._  
  
“I beg your pardon, I am an Innovator-class unit of level VI clearance,” you blurt out. “My class and rank indicates that I have significant technical expertise in the fields of engineering, bioengineering, machine repair and maintenance, programming, and medicine. I also have some passing experience with code-breaking and puzzle-solving,” you add in a rush, “though those are ancillary to my key functions.”  
  
Delinquent stares at you as though you had said something very impolite indeed. Scofflaw, on the other hand, is surveying you with a mixture of mild satisfaction and extreme curiosity.  
  
“Told you,” he says to Delinquent, smiling. “This fellow’s full of surprises.”  
  
“Still don’t think he looks like much,” Delinquent snorts.  
  
“So try him out,” Scofflaw says languidly. “Give him a chance to show off his _significant technical expertise_. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” He turns to address the last part to you and you manage to meet his gaze for a second; his eyes are the oddly vibrant green of the algae that used to contaminate the cloning tanks. A clump of algae smaller than your palm could spread through ten tanks in two weeks and kill every last occupant: it would leach the nutrients from the life-support fluid and the clones would just wither away like neglected plants. Which was – unfair, really; you'd had to recycle so many clones before you could even start modifying their wetware. You have always had a distaste for jobs not done to your standards.  
  
“Yes,” you say quietly, and then louder - “Yes, I would. I will fix, or improve, any mechanical appliance you choose,” you tell Delinquent, almost without stammering. The display of confidence leaves him looking nonplussed.  
  
“Well, our phone isn’t running,” he says, as though you’re a hired electrician. You wish you had it in you to bristle. Even a little.  
  
“Well?” Scofflaw says to you. “You up for the challenge?” There is something odd about his smile.  
  
  
You understand why once you actually see the phone; despite your formidable skills not even you could resurrect this pile of shattered plastic and smashed resistors. But you do enjoy a challenge.  
  
“AD doesn’t like jolly hold music,” Scofflaw says, leaning one-handed on the end of your table, the other hand tucked in a pocket. “Thinks it’s mocking him. But he thinks most things are mocking him.” His face splits into a grin. But there are more pressing processes than deciphering Scofflaw's disingenuous, double-edged speech: not many, of course – it's only a phone – but enough to warm up the central memory.  
  
“I’ll need a welder and some solder,” you murmur, flicking through the parts. Not everything is horrifically damaged. The capacitor is miraculously intact; so is the hybrid coil. “You’ll need a new casing. Something that will resist great stress.”  
  
“Good luck with that,” Scofflaw says, “AD’s the strongest man in the world,” but you barely hear him.  
  
“A roll of copper wire. Solder. New resistors. I can build you a better phone,” you say more forcefully. “I assume you haven’t bought a new one yet and you won’t need to.”  
“You’re not stammering,” he says. This sleeper on the rails does awful things to your train of thought; you can only blink at him, stammering, “What?”  
  
“When you talk about that stuff you don’t stammer,” Scofflaw says, and cups your chin to tilt your face up. You swallow. He’s looking directly at you, for once, and being the centre of Scofflaw’s attention is doing strange things to your sympathetic nervous system. “That’s your thing, right? You’re in your element.” His fingers are leaving first-degree burns on your face, or so you think. You've engineered clones with stranger abilities.  
  
You had forgotten about your headaches and stomachaches and assorted other aches while tending to your new patient, and they wrest back control of your nociceptors with more force than you deem necessary.  
  
“Don’t worry, I’ll get someone to bring you that stuff,” he says airily. “In the meantime, make yourself at home! You’re a guest now.” His hands land heavily on your shoulders. “Hospitality’s so good you’ll never want to leave.”  
  
Considering that the next thing he does is to bring you a glass of water and some painkillers, you may just believe him.  
  
  
You fix the phone, in a manner of speaking -- you are not sure if it constitutes a fix when most of the phone is entirely new. It lasts half a week before one of them has disassembled it and hidden the parts; you suspect Scofflaw, but neither seems particularly bothered by the state of affairs.  
  
  
The couch is yours. Empowered by the assorted parts gifted to you by Scofflaw, you gradually expand your dominion to include the coffee table (battered, scarred; it looks like it's taken both ends of a knife very often and one leg has been replaced entirely) and a neighboring armchair. Gradually the living area - you are not sure what it is; it appears to be composed solely of squashy, salvaged furniture in a room with no windows, bordered by a rusty, faded kitchenette - becomes markedly _yours_. You even have subjects: an assortment of pens, ordered by shade and flow. You put them to work mercilessly on pads of yellow foolscap that keep appearing on the kitchen counter.   
  
  
And you don’t leave.  
  
  
Not that you couldn’t, you think. There is nothing to stop you - there is no door, only a curtain over the entrance - but the couch is far more comfortable than damp concrete, and everything you could need to occupy you is provided. There is even a pile of blankets, and two times a day a box of slightly crushed takeaway appears in the kitchen. You never notice who brings it, but you suspect.  
  
Scofflaw doesn’t speak to you much for the first few days. You suppose he has better things to do than care for strays, but on day three he saunters into your domain - with casual, cheerful disregard for concepts such as personal space and private property - and gives the whole place a once-over with a low, impressed whistle.   
  
“Love what you’re doing here, PI,” he says cheerfully, and strides over a stack of your computations with awful ease. Your hand is frozen halfway over a delicate tangle of wires; solder drips from the end of the iron. Mechanically, you turn to look at him.  
  
“H-hello,” you say, your voice rusty from lack of use. He drops onto the sofa beside you and the smell of tobacco and cologne is like a smack to the face; you reel slightly, trying not to offend, trying even harder not to short-circuit your cathode array.   
  
“What’re you making?” he says, peering at it. Your hand trembles even harder. His face is about half a handspan away from the hot tip of your soldering iron. Not that the burns would show - you could treat it immediately, make sure there was little trace, or you could _ensure_ that there was a highly visible trace - and the thought of touching Scofflaw’s face unnerves you so profoundly that the soldering iron drops from your boneless fingers.  
  
He catches it before it catches you on the bare knee, which peers through your threadbare pants.   
  
“Kettle,” you whisper, staring. It swings from his fingers; back, forth, back, forth, inches from your skin. Your knee tingles.   
  
“Kettle?” He raises an eyebrow, twirls the iron back into his hand with the same grace he employs for wielding a knife. “Should’ve just said something. I would’ve bought you one! Anything you need, just say it, PI. Don’t need to be worrying about whether you’re being _imposing_ or _impolite-_ ” You twitch instinctively. He must notice that, you think - but instead he continues, “-just good business! I wouldn’t expect myself to work under conditions where, well, I felt like something was missing. So I won’t expect you to, either.” He smiles. You smile back; you suspect it is weak and watery.  
  
“Work,” you say, because it is the only thing you can think to say.   
  
“Nothing big,” Scofflaw says dismissively, and now he is tossing the soldering iron from hand to hand. His fingers catch on the cable, twirl it with enough force that it jumps into his opposite hand; you are mostly transfixed and slightly nervous, because it is _still switched on_. “Just a few jobs here and there. You’re good at this stuff, aren’t you?” He taps one of your discarded plans, extensively annotated in your incomprehensible shorthand. “Go on. Tell me all about it,” and he lounges back on the couch as if he owns it - well, he does own it, you realise, feeling incredibly out of place on a couch that was your fortress not all of a minute ago.   
  
“About what?” You clear your throat.  
  
“Everything.” You can only describe the light in Scofflaw’s eyes as a gleam. “But alright, fella, let’s start with _explosives_.”  
  
You happen to know quite a lot about explosives.  
  
Whenever you talk about your fields of expertise everything except the relevant information is relegated to a tier of lower importance. You _strongly dislike_ not being understood. You also strongly dislike being misunderstood, which is a subtly different matter but one that leaves you considerably more irked. So you are very clear in your discussion with Scofflaw. Nothing is left to doubt.  
  
This is the only explanation for how close you and Scofflaw have ended up, you realise: shoulder to shoulder, your arm wound over his as you point to _this_ diagram and _these_ equations.   
  
You consider hyperventilating. You also consider that he would certainly hear it if you began hyperventilating at this proximity.  
  
“So, PI,” he says, tapping the table with the soldering iron - has he not put it down? It must still be on, you think. There is a dark mark in the table when he lifts it away, but there were enough of those to begin with; you can’t be sure. “You can make all of these?”  
  
“Ah - well,” you take a deep breath, “the components are primarily military-grade. I don’t know how you would obtain such things, but-”  
  
“Leave it to me,” he says, patting you on the back. “I’ll worry about all the boring stuff. All you need to do is make a few of these sweethearts for me. You can do that, can’t you?” And as he speaks he slings one arm around your shoulders and you go stiff and still at this unexpected intrusion into your personal space.   
  
“Y-yes,” you say breathlessly, “I could, but-” He tugs you closer. Your heart may be on the verge of collapse.  
  
“No buts about it, PI,” he says, and - and the iron is in his hand, close to your jaw. Every thought stops. “We all gotta do what we must, don’t we?”   
  
“I - what?” Your pulse throbs so hard you can feel it when you swallow. Your fingertips will leave tiny bruises in the hollow around your kneecaps. “Well - yes, I - yes,” you say desperately. “Whatever you think is - I-I mean, you - you’ve been a v-very gracious host - I would b-be happy - happy to repay th-the favour - “  
  
“Glad to hear it,” he says softly. You think his tone is intended to be soft and friendly, so why does the back of your head prickle while he’s talking? You have been burnt before - the cloning labs were not accident-free - but you think, carefully not looking at Scofflaw, that nobody has ever burned you on purpose. No one has ever drugged you and kidnapped you before, either. Recently, your life is full of firsts.  
  
“Anyway,” he adds, springing to his feet - and you cannot quite hide the way you dodge his occupied hand, “thought you liked doing this sort of stuff! Working with your hands, all that. I’m a pretty hands-on man myself,” and then he stares at the soldering iron, face a perfect portrait of surprise. “Geez, was I still holding that? Huh. Sorry, PI. Must have given you-” He lets go. It hits the floor between your feet with a solid, heavy clatter; your feet fly onto the couch and you huddle there, clutching your knees to your chest, wide-eyed.  
  
“-quite a scare,” he finishes more quietly. You are not certain how to read the look on his face.   
  
  
Once he leaves you gather up all the plans, with the full intention of putting them somewhere out of sight - in the oven, perhaps - but what if you forget they are there and turn the oven on? (Never mind the fact that you cannot bake with what you have available, and that you are not even sure whether the oven works - you did not reach class VI clearance without being paranoid about your paperwork.)   
  
You get as far as piling them together, ordering them by type and complexity, and then you sag to your knees against the counter and your breaths are shaky and heaving as you clutch your designs to your chest.   
  
He had _liked_ them. He had listened to your horribly longwinded explanations and asked what they could be used for and let you gesture wildly at him. Your creativity was only tolerated on Derse provided it furthered the war: but you had shown him a plan for a _nuclear-powered bathtub with singing ducks_ , for Skaia’s sake, and he had been enthralled.   
  
You exhale, trembling; the papers rustle in your grip. In your mind’s eye you can still remember the smile on his face as he held a live iron not two inches from your cheek; you also remember that this is his place, and that he took you off the streets and fed you and that he has asked so very little of you and that, even before he threatened you, you were not about to tell him _no_.  
  
  
Two days later he turns up with all the ingredients you asked for and more, Delinquent grudgingly hauling a crate of machinery that you regard with the same delight as a child on Giftmas. He has even brought you a kettle. Even Scofflaw’s presence could not dim your enthusiasm for your new toys.   
  
Strangely enough, it doesn’t. He’s downright jolly, and the mood sets the corners of your own mouth to twitching upwards. He pats you on the back and presents you with a handful of assorted items - a screwdriver set, some pens, a couple of spanners and a hex key - and winks at you. “Ready to work miracles?”  
  
“Decidedly,” you say, and dive into the crate. Delinquent huffs something you don’t quite hear - probably derogatory, based on precedent, and you decide to ignore it. It is rude of you, but the effort required to care seems overwhelming. Especially in the face of such endless bounty.  
  
“Gotta get a move on, Scoff,” he tells Scofflaw, and Scofflaw rolls his eyes.   
  
“Please, AD. Those funds won’t move themselves!” he says. You nod, half to yourself; this confirms the suspected purpose of your devices.   
  
“Scofflaw,” you say, quite softly, and he turns to look at you with a broad smile on his face.   
  
“What’s up, PI?” He leans over to examine the contents of the crate. “Gosh. Sure looks complicated in there. Glad we’ve got someone who knows what he’s doing, don’t know what we’d do with it otherwise.” You are learning to identify this as flattery. It does not warm you any less.  
  
“I - “ You swallow. “Never mind. Did you buy the potassium nitrate-” But he’s already glanced over at the table, where you spent all of last night carefully arranging the chaos to look natural, even more carefully ensuring that your favourite little sketches would be right at the top of the pile.  
  
“Huh,” he says, plucking one off the pile. You do not dare look. “You been busy? Didn’t see this one the last time I came in.”  
  
“An - an older model.” You make a show of looking briefly at it. “Sturdy, nonetheless. Usable.”  
  
“Huh,” he repeats, and then, “Yeah,” and then, “I _like_ it. What do you reckon we can do with this one, guys?”   
  
There is a small warmth under your collarbones, not corresponding to any anatomical location in particular. Despite its completely psychological origins, you duck your head to hide a smile just as he says, “What did you have planned, PI?”  
  
  
Two weeks later, bombs built and dispatched, Scofflaw brings you a new present: a radio.   
  
“Keep it on,” he tells you, grinning. “AM 1081.” He will tell you no more when pressed (admittedly, you have all the pressing power of a damp cotton ball) and merely says, “Hope you like news!”   
  
At first the radio annoys you, but after a while it lulls you; its rhythmic drone becomes background music while you plan and calculate and refine. It is not until you startle awake, draped half-off the couch, that you realise the regular news transmission has changed to something - different.  
  
There’s swelling, scratchy music, certainly not radio quality. Frowning, you sit up to turn it off.  
  
“Hold it right there, folks,” Peccant Scofflaw’s voice drawls, over the radio, and you freeze mid-reach. “We interrupt your regular broadcast to bring you a _special_ announcement. Ladies and gentlemen, I have always wanted to say that. Coming live to you from an undisclosed location: - ” The next sound you hear is deafening, and the transmission implodes in a crackle of static. You hold your breath.   
  
“-we have just robbed the Metropolis National Bank,” he says lazily, scratchy but unmistakably smug. “Your call, coppers.” The signal dies.  
  
You ease your hand away from your chest; your fingernails are etched in the heels of your palms. The folds of the blanket are imprinted into your palm.   
  
You are Peculiar Innovator, and you have just committed your first felony _in absentia._  
  
The thought thrills you more than it should.


End file.
